Abstract:
The Space Radar Laboratory-1 (SRL-1) was a payload launched with the Space Shuttle &Endeavor& (STS-59) on April 9, 1994. The SRL-1 comprises two elements: a suite of radar instruments called the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR), and the Measurement of Air Pollution from Satellite (MAPS) instrument. The SIR-C/X-SAR radar was jointly developed by NASA with ... DARA of Germany and ASI of Italy.

The Space Radar Laboratory-2 (SRL-2) was launched with the Space Shuttle &Endeavor& (STS-68) on September 30, 1994. As with SRL-1, SRL-2 consists of the SIR-C/X-SAR radar instruments and the MAPS instrument.

Images obtained from the SIR-C/X-SAR are available from the NASA JPL Imaging Radar Page:

The objectives of the SIR-C/X-SAR were to provide information about the Earth's land surfaces including vegetation coverage, snow pack extent, wetlands, geologic features, volcanic processes, ocean wave heights and wind speeds over the oceans. The most useful feature of imaging radar is its ability to make measurements over any region at any time regardless of weather or sunlight. The SIR-C/X-SAR is a synthetic aperture radar that transmits pulses of microwave energy from the Shuttle toward Earth and measures the strength and time delay of the energy scattered back to the SIR-C/X-SAR antenna. The motion of the Shuttle between the transmission of the beam and the reception of the backscattered radiation is used to &synthesize& or create an antenna (aperture) much longer than the actual antenna. This results in finer resolution images.

The SIR-C/X-SAR scientific team has identified more than 400 sites where data was taken. Nineteen of the sites are designated &supersites&, making them priority targets for scientific investigations. There are an additional 15 backup supersites. The supersites were chosen to represent different environments within each scientific discipline. The following are areas of investigation and supersites for the SRL mission: